‘Hilbert Space‘ will be performed at the closing ceremonies of the Internationales Short Film Festival Hamburg

The Kolbenhof is an area full of undiscovered surfaces that had never been played at. It is a playground for experiments of all kinds. A huge stage that feels like it was specifically created for the New York based artist Karl Nussbaum.

He has been linked to the Hamburg International Short Film Festivals for years now. In the early period of his work he indulged in visual attacks on the audience and his fascination for endoscopic experiments and bodily fluids. These days the son of a professor of mathematics and holocaust survivor is dealing with his own past and that of his family. This painful and contemplative process led Nussbaum to get involved with spirituality, mourning and death – and the ›Hilbert Space‹, a world of pure mathematics. He will explore this theoretical place, his father’s field of expertise, in which temporal and spatial dimensions are infinite and in which life and death merge into pure infinity. His vehicle for this is a screen made of silk that he manipulates in the course of the performance and on which images of traditional mourning ceremonies, mathematical formulas, weather recordings, decay and empty living spaces collide.